Emergence via Phase Transitions — why different systems converge
New arXiv paper proposes the Hierarchical Emergence Framework (HEF) to explain why radically different systems — grokking circuits, evolved metabolic networks, physics renormalization flows — converge on strikingly similar high-level structures.
Models emergence as a phase transition in a mechanism landscape, with a critical energy threshold separating exploration (competing mechanisms) from convergence (fixed-point attraction).
Applies thermodynamic and information-theoretic constraints to unify phenomena across ML, biology, and physics.